There are currently three types of cellular communication base stations or systems in use today for the transmission and reception of W-CDMA and UMTS based cellular communication signals, i.e., macrocells, microcells and picocells. Macrocells, which today sit atop cellular towers, operate at approximately 1,000 watts. The coverage of macrocells is in miles. Microcells, which are smaller in size than macrocells, are adapted to sit atop telephone poles, for example, and the coverage is in blocks. Microcells operate at approximately 20 watts. A smaller yet microcell requires about 5 watts of power to operate. Picocells are base stations approximately 8″×18″ in size, are adapted for deployment inside buildings such as shopping malls, office buildings or the like, and output about 0.25 watts of power. The coverage of a picocell is about 50 yards.
All of the picocells and microcells in use today include a “motherboard” upon which various electrical components have been individually mounted by the customer. A front-end portion of the motherboard (i.e., the RF transceiver section thereof located roughly between the picocell antenna and mixers thereof) is currently referred to in the art as the “node B local area front end,” i.e., a portion of the picocell or microcell on which all the radio frequency control electrical components such as, for example, the filters, amplifiers, couplers, inductors and the like have been individually mounted and interconnected.
While the configuration and structure of the current motherboards has proven satisfactory for most applications, certain disadvantages associated with the current front-end RF configuration thereof include performance, the costs associated with a customer's placement of individual RF components onto the motherboard during assembly, and the space which such RF components occupy on such motherboards.
There thus remains the need for increased RF component performance and a reduction in both the cost of these motherboards and the space occupied by the RF components on such motherboards. The present invention provides a compact front-end RF component module which addresses and solves the above-identified needs.